


The Unauthorized Biography of Rebecca Silver, Pyromaniac

by technically_direct



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, Post 3x07, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Writing, rebecca silver origins
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-29
Updated: 2020-01-28
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:00:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22457608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/technically_direct/pseuds/technically_direct
Summary: How Mick Rory became a best selling romance novelist, and also how he got his head on straight.
Kudos: 13





	The Unauthorized Biography of Rebecca Silver, Pyromaniac

**Author's Note:**

> Yo, bold is typed stuff. I figure that's pretty clear, but just wanted to have that written down at the top.

He starts writing after Vietnam. Or, well—okay. He doesn’t _intend_ to start writing _ever_ —Snart was always the brains of the operation, always the talker. Mick wasn’t an idiot by any means, but, well, what was it that that Snart said? His talents lie in other areas.

Mostly areas that involved punching people or setting things on fire.

He wasn’t a bad thief—all the times he got caught were for _arson_ , after all, _not theft_ —but compared to Len? Everyone came up short.

But then Len had to go and _die_. Which, let’s be real, he didn’t handle well. At all.

And then there was the whole Doomworld thing. Which… the less said about that the better, honestly.

The new folks are alright. Pretty’s a little much sometimes, but Amaya’s straightforward in a way he can really get behind. That new wind chick has some gumption to her, got the fun kinda hard edges that he can’t help but poke at.

And he does. It’s kinda his thing, playing with fire, getting burned. Lighting a spark and seeing what chaos pops off.

And then they end up in Vietnam. And him and Pretty run into his dad.

He should’a brought a fucking flask into the jungle.

~~~~~

Pretty… complicates things. All this shit about _healing_ and _closure_ and _grief_. After they get back on the Waverider—after he tries to burn and after his dad points a gun at his head and after he finally, _finally_ punches the bastard—Pretty… worries. More than he did before. Mick’s always been good at being too scary to really cultivate that sorta shit in most folks, but Pretty just fucking _cares_ , apparently.

God, people _giving a shit_ about him is such a fucking _pain_.

He doesn’t miss those first few months, when they all treated him like some kinda dumb hanger-on pyromaniac, but he does kinda miss the thing where they didn’t really give a shit about him. The sweet spot between where they treated him like Snart 2.0 but dumber and worse, and when most of them were alright with him being taken out like Ol’ Yeller.

He’s _still_ tempted to set Rip on fire for that. With the extra time as Kronos, it’s been literal _decades_ for him, and he still wants to see that limey bastard burn.

Pretty spends the next few days after Vietnam _hovering_. It’s awful. Doesn’t he know a lost cause when he sees one?

They’re alone in the galley when he tells Pretty as much.

Pretty looks like he’s just gotten punched. A body blow, probably an uppercut directly into the solar plexus, if Mick were to guess. He’s punched a lot of people, he knows exactly what kinds of things would cause that face.

“Wow—I, uh… _jeez,_ Mick, I thought—“

Mick bares his teeth at him and hisses, to really drive the point home.

Pretty soldiers on, because he’s got the survival instincts of a damn lemming. “I’m not—alright, look, Mick, you’ve gotta talk to someone about this!”

“You volunteering, pretty boy?” Mick’s pretty sure he’s not. Pretty’s in this for the history and his girlfriend, not for this whole found family shit they’ve awkwardly stumbled into over the past few years.

“I guess so, yeah!” Dammit.

Mick leans in, closer to Pretty and his stupid, perfect hair. There’s less than a foot separating their faces. He maintains eye contact. “You want me to tell you about the first time I set myself on fire, _Nathaniel_ , about the way the flames licked their way up my skin for the first time?”

“Um.” Nate leans back, and breaks eye contact first. “I was just—look, Mick, if you wanna talk, I’ll listen, alright? You can’t bottle this shit up.”

Mick gets up, and tosses his empty beer bottle into the trash, grabbing another from the fridge. “Don’t wanna talk, Pretty.”

“Well, if you every do—Did you just use my _actual name?_ ”

Mick shoves his way past him, and goes out the door, despite there being _plenty of room_ to go around. “Nope.”

~~~~~

It’s a few days later, and he can’t get what Pretty said out of his fucking head. Which is unfortunate, because Pretty is, actually, incredibly correct about it.

Dammit.

He’s not going to—he can’t just _talk_ to someone, open up and be _honest,_ let alone fucking _vulnerable,_ to somebody else’s _face_.

But his head is still in Vietnam. And his usual method of setting things on fire until all he cares about is flames _isn’t fucking working_. Neither is drinking.

Getting it out it is. Goody.

He finds a typewriter in the storage room of random stuff they’ve needed on jobs before. It’s light blue plastic, and weighs about forty pounds.

It sits on his desk for a few weeks, _taunting him_. It’s just—urgh. He can’t even _type well_ , this was a _terrible idea_. The fuck’s he going to write about anyway?

He sees it when he goes to sleep. He sees it when he wakes up. _Every time_ he leaves his room he has to walk past the damn thing. He can’t get away from the light blue machine, can’t stop _thinking_ about it.

Time is meaningless in the temporal zone, but one night, after he’s killed an entire six pack by himself and the entire rest of the crew is asleep, he finally sits down in front of it.

He threads the paper in, like they taught him in school in the old days, back before they had computers in classrooms.

Backspaces made you soft. If you said something you should be fucking _committed_ to it, goddammit.

He cracks his knuckles, pushing them against each other so they all make noise at once, before popping his thumbs one at a time. He takes a moment, and tries to think up a good sentence. Something good and punchy to start, something that _means_ something. And he lands on it. Or, at least, something sorta similar to something that _could_ be good.

**My mind is still in the jungle, at the wrong end of a gun** , he types, **confronted by my own personal failings made flesh**.

Christ, when did he get so melodramatic? Maybe all that time around Snart.

That isn’t what he meant to say, quite. It didn’t really _sound_ like him, it felt like some other person.

That first bit, though….

That first bit was pretty good, if he said so himself. He wasn’t really a _reader_ , but he’s spent enough time lying low in safe houses with only Len and the books he stole from the drugstore for company—he knows how to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to bad writing.

He goes down a few lines and tries again.

**My head is still in that jungle, at the wrong end of a gun.**

He can’t think of anything else to write, but it sounds better. More like _him_ , not like somebody else driving his body like a puppet. It feels almost done as a thought. Complete. Resolved. _Whole_.

Ah, hell. Pretty was right about not bottling up feelings, wasn’t he.

Damn it.

~~~~~

He just—

Well, he kinda keeps it up, is all. Not always about Vietnam (though, hooo boy, is there a lot to wrap his head around about fucking Vietnam), but he just, well, keeps writing. Sometimes just a sentence at the time. Not every day, but when he gets the right kind of drunk and the mood strikes him, he sits down and just kinda _goes_.

And, you know, if, as time goes by, he starts needing to be less and less drunk , and it just starts happening more and more often, it’s nobody’s business but his own.

The thing is, though….

The thing is that he’s starting to fucking like it. Like, it _served a purpose_ before, and to be honest it served said purpose pretty fucking well, but it’s—ah, hell, what was that city with the kidnapping thing? It was in Europe, right? He’s pretty sure they mentioned in the first _Die Hard._ Anyway, that. _That_ ’ _s_ happening, but with writing.

He doesn’t trust it, to be perfectly honest. Nothing that he likes fucking _lasts_. Even fire goes out eventually.

And then, you know, there’s that thing with the evil Nazi alternate dimension and Stein fucking _dies_ , so…

He was right.

Nothing fucking lasts.

Also, that universe’s version of Len is here, but he’s named Leo and he’s all self-actualized and pitying and shit. Got his head on straighter than Len ever did. Not constantly stealing shit.

He ends up ~~hiding in his room~~ siting in front of his typewriter with the door locked, a lot, just trying to do _something_. ~~Avoiding Leo~~ Writing isn’t going very well.

While they’re still camped out in the present, he goes to a Barnes and Noble, and manages to make out with five conveniently sized books from various end-caps. He only pays for a coffee, and one of those flaky pastries. He doesn’t even look at what he snagged till he’s back in his room.

Len always liked to look at the loot on the way back, always liked to be sure of _what_ he was taking. Liked to case a joint for weeks, if it was a big score. Mick usually just grabbed things on instinct unless something _really_ caught his eye. Usually, instinct was kinda a mixed bag, but at least you got some _interesting_ loot.

Anyway, when he gets back he discovers that he has a true crime novel about a serial killer (could be fun), a mystery novel set in East Texas (promising), a book about LSAT prep (thick enough to be a weapon, at least), and two romance novels. One of them has three suns and a gal falling into the arms of some sorta future soldier on the cover; the other has a shirtless guy with long hair who’s built like a Mac truck sort of gently hugging this chick in front of a sunset.

Anyway, the next time he knows Pretty’s in the library, he throws the LSAT book at his head. Just so he knows that Mick’s thinking about him, obviously. It’s a paperback, so it doesn’t hit too bad. Leo had said something about the team uniting in a time of tragedy, after all.

Look at him.

Uniting.

Strengthening the bonds of fucking friendship.

He’s fine.

He’s also still avoiding Leo. So, that means that he’s spending a lot of time locked in his room unless he can avoid it, and reading. Because _writing_ is sure as shit not working right now.

The serial killer book is alright, but nothing to write home about. Like, the _story_ is ok, but the actual _writing?_ Isn’t. Too much of that thing where the writer goes all ‘little did they know, but…’, especially at the end of chapters. What was that called again? Fuck, it’s been more than three decades since he’s taken an English class, how the hell is he supposed to know. Too much of that mustache twirly shit, though.

The mystery novel’s better. Good and fast and just grizzly enough to really be interesting. Lotsa weird, complicated relationships.

Mick likes weird, complicated relationships.

Once he finishes that one he throws it at Sara, when she’s alone in the office being broody. It’s a thin paperback, so it really gets a nice arc. She catches it.

“What the hell, Mick?” She asks, looking bemused.

“You left this in the kitchen.”

“…Did I?”

“Yep.” Mick says, instead of ‘ _I dunno, maybe Len woulda liked it’_.

She sees through his bullshit immediately, but doesn’t call him on it. They get each other, in a way that the new guys really don’t. “Do I want to know?”

“Probably not.”

Look at how well-adjusted he is.

(the true crime novel he hides in the library, carefully balanced over a few heavy books that only Nate would pull out, right on the top shelf. _Eventually_ , that trap’s gonna pay off.)

He’s a few chapters into the romance novel with the three suns on the cover when he first feels the urge to set it on fire. To see it crackle and disintegrate out of existence, to see at least something gorgeous spring forth from this _trash_. He’s a few more in when he actually pulls out one of his lighters, a big metal zippo that he lifted off one of Capone’s guys when they were hanging out in Chicago, and begins rhythmically opening and closing it with one hand, feeling the metal click shut between his fingers.

It’s been a _while_ since he had to do that.

By the time he’s halfway through, he’s lighting it every minute or so. Not staring at it, just feeling the heat of the flame and the comfort of the _fire_. Knowing it’s _there_ , just in case.

Gideon doesn’t like it when he starts large fires on the actual ship, so after a while he sets the book aside and drinks a frankly obscene amount of cheap vodka while he’s eating dinner. He manages to avoid Leo in the hallway and locks himself back into his room; Haircut tries to corner him in the hallway to talk about something, but Mick _really_ can’t bring himself to give a shit about whatever the fuck Leo’s doing with a damn puppet.

He’s done with the book in a few more hours. It’s atrocious. He puts it in his burn pile.

He looks at Axl’s cage. “I could do better than that.”

Axl scurries around and looks at him, tilting his head curiously.

“I _could_.”

The rat tilts his head the other way.

“ _Axl_.”

Axl turns away and starts digging in the little layer of woodchips and newspaper that covers the bottom of his cage.

“Hrrgh.” Mick manfully resists the urge to scrub a hand down his face, and stands up, moving towards his desk. He’s got a big ream of paper out, so he threads a sheet into the typewriter, clamping it in.

“I can’t believe you’re makin’ me do this, Axl.” He can believe it; he’s always been kinda a pushover like that to certain people. Snart, for one. Snart’s sister, for another. And Axl, apparently.

He started typing.

**Buck was surrounded on all sides by hostiles,** he began, **with only a half-charged laser-pistol to defend himself with. He’d joined the space marines to get off his home planet, to get away from all the death, but now his was almost a promise.**

Alright, Mick thought, taking his hands off the typewriter for a moment. That can _go_ somewhere.


End file.
